Facilitated Workshops

You can’t lead the meeting and be in it. On the biggest questions a business faces – strategy, culture, how the team works – the CEO needs to be a full participant, not the referee. That’s what an external facilitator buys: everyone in the room is in the conversation, including you.

I bring something most facilitators can’t: I’ve sat on both sides of the private equity table. The sessions I run are designed around what the investment actually requires – and they end in decisions, owners and dates, not a deck that gathers dust.

The thesis is a hypothesis. Turning it into a strategy the team actually owns – and a Value Creation Plan they’ll execute rather than inherit – is the highest-leverage session a portfolio company can run.

Built on Roger Martin’s Playing to Win framework, the session forces the choices most teams avoid: where to play, how to win, what to stop doing, and what capabilities the plan actually requires. You leave with a strategy on a page, decisions with owners, and a team that argued its way to agreement rather than nodding through a presentation.

Culture is getting shaped either way – the only question is whether by design or by drift. Under PE ownership, drift is expensive: pace, accountability and honesty either compound value or quietly tax it.

This session starts with the culture you actually have – the good, the bad, and the surprising – then makes deliberate choices about what to keep, what to evolve, and what to change, tied to what the plan demands rather than to posters on a wall.

A group of capable executives is not a leadership team. These sessions do the work that turns one into the other: how the team debates, decides, holds each other accountable, and executes as one unit rather than in parallel.

For teams that need more than a session, this is where facilitated work hands over to [team coaching] – a twelve-month discipline rather than a day